"Deliberate Distortions of Sri Aurobindo's Life and Yoga" – edited by Raman Reddy

The above book is freely available at: 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iWfRqqqmDLirSQyWkax9V8-q-3zipaop/view?usp=sharing

Preface

This book is a counter to the vicious attack on Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual stature that came in the form of a hostile biography of him by Peter Heehs entitled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, published by Columbia University Press in 2008. All the articles in this book are in defence of Sri Aurobindo and many of them have been written by well-known historians and academicians. Though the book is written in support of the disciples and followers of Sri Aurobindo and their spontaneous rejection of the gross distortions of their Master’s life and teachings, the refutations themselves are based on a scholarly study of Sri Aurobindo’s works and a thorough examination of the historical facts of his life. I hasten to make here a necessary clarification with regard to the study of great spiritual personalities such as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

  ...full text...

Praise for “The Battle for Sanskrit” by Rajiv Malhotra

“Is Sanskrit political or sacred, oppressive or liberating, dead or alive?”

For the past sixty years my primary activity has been to interpret Sanskrit and sanskriti. Indeed, Malhotra and I are sailing in the same boat. This book provokes a debate between the ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ of our heritage. It exposes that many outsiders pretend to be insiders, but their hidden agenda is to convince ignorant Hindus that the Vedas are myths and that the traditional claims are nonsensical. They pretend to know our traditions even better than our highest exponents.

  ...full text...

Battle for Indian History: How to fight it, and how not (part 3) – Virendra Parekh

3 – A history cast in a mould

The shoddiness and incompetence visible in history books written by the so-called eminent historians are not due to individual carelessness or lack of information. For communists, the use of any history is to prove their dogma. The moving power of communism is a deep-rooted self-alienation and its main ally is cultural and spiritual illiteracy. The Leftist writers have done their best to propagate these ‘values’ through their books on history.

Their histories are set to a formula: Ancient India must be presented as a land of discord, a land in the grip of a social and political system marked by injustice, extreme inequalities and oppression leading to perpetual social tensions.

  ...full text...

Battle for Indian History: How to fight it, and how not (part 1) – Virendra Parekh

1 – A history in service of rulers

Indian history is a battlefield. Hindu nationalists fight off invading colonial canards and Marxist mumbo jumbo of materialistic interpretation of history. Secularists, alarmed by the saffron surge, sound shrill warnings against communalization of history writing. Stalinist activists masquerading as historians girdle up to resist intrusion of sundries (i.e. anyone outside their clique) onto their turf in media, academia and research institutions. Muslim scholars resist attempts to portray Islam and Muslims as villains. Academic historians raise their hands in despair at politicization of the past to serve current needs. And the new generation just wonders why there is so much fuss over an age that is dead and gone.

  ...full text...

Sri Aurobindo and the Hindu-Muslim problem – By Prof. Kittu Reddy

There is widespread belief among a certain section of intellectuals and historians – both Indian and abroad – that Sri Aurobindo was responsible for the partition of India and the consequent blood letting and other problems that followed. The reason given to justify this position is that Sri Aurobindo during his active political career stressed heavily on Hinduism and on Hindu nationalism and this provoked a natural and inevitable reaction among the Muslims; this reaction led ultimately to the formation of Pakistan. [extract]

  ...full text...

Hijacking Sri Aurobindo – by Rajesh Patel

The religious culture which now goes by the name of Hinduism … gave itself no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the Godward endeavour of the human spirit. An immense many-sided and many-staged provision for a spiritual self-building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion, Sanatana Dharma…. (Sri Aurobindo, 1919)

Of recent years there has been an academic controversy amongst the more scholarly followers of Sri Aurobindo on the subject of whether he should be considered a Hindu and whether his teachings could be classed as Hinduism.

  ...full text...

Did Sri Aurobindo Lie in the Uttarpara Speech? – Extract from Jugal Kishore Mukherji’s Letter

[The following extract from Jugal Kishore Mukherji’s first letter to the Ashram Trustees in June 1986 shows that Matriprasad Satyamurthy (the present secretary of the Ashram Trust) has been colluding with Peter Heehs for a long time. Peter Heehs was then editor of the Ashram’s Archives and Research magazine in which he first published his “great discoveries” on how Sri Aurobindo was a coward, on how he played a double game with the British police, on how he lied to the public with regard to instructing his lawyer Chittaranjan Das who defended him in the Court, etc, etc. This particular extract deals with the last distortion – that Sri Aurobindo continued to give advice to Chittaranjan Das in the Alipore Bomb Trial despite what he said in the Uttarpara speech on having left everything to God during his year-long confinement in Alipore Jail! – Bireshwar Choudhury]

At times, in the pages of our Journal Archives and Research, accounts of events given by some sundry persons are made use of in order to prove Sri Aurobindo wrong!! Sri Aurobindo’s own spiritual statements are controverted and are sought to be proved false – and that, too, on the authority of our young friend MATRIPRASAD! Too strange to believe? – Yes, so is it. Let me explain. 

  ...full text...

Matriprasad Satyamurthy’s Remark on a Controversial Take on Sri Aurobindo’s Life – by Bireshwar Choudhury

This is with regard to the news story titled “Bengal minister’s Aurobindo play sitting on a time bomb / Controversial Take On Guru’s Exit From Freedom Struggle” published in The Times of India (Mumbai edition) on 25 April, 2015. The controversial take is stated in the following manner:

“Did Rishi Aurobindo ‘run away’ from the freedom movement?”

“Standing behind prison bars, Hemchandra bursts out in anger: “You (Aurobindo) have saved yourself but history won’t forgive you.” In another scene, Aurobindo’s brother Barin says: “Why did I tell my brother’s survival lies only in mixing religion with politics? Little did I know he’d give up politics and take refuge in religion.”

  ...full text...

“The Hindus: An Alternative History” by Wendy Doniger ― Review by Ali Sheikh

There you have it. Weird Hindu doomsdays. Sex-crazed kings. Cruel gods. Men marrying dogs. Phalluses everywhere—some erect and some flaccid. Ladies and gentlemen, we finally have an alternative history of Hinduism. And yes, left uncontested, in all likelihood these are the “insights” a whole new generation of students and researchers might learn, internalize, and cite in future scholarly works. [Extract – read full review below]

  ...full text...

It is time to speak up against the Hinduphobia of foreign writers: Vamsee Juluri

March 29, 2015, 6:00 am IST Narayani Ganesh in Treasure Hunt | India | Times of India

Vamsee Juluri, professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco, speaks up for the anonymous Hindu who, he says, was silent all those years of colonial rule only to be criticized as an ‘oppressor’ post-Independence. His new book ‘Rearming Hinduism’ seeks to restore to the millennia-old faith its intellectual heritage by reintroducing Hinduism to Hindus. Juluri tells Narayani Ganesh that foreign ‘experts’ have only contributed to the misconceptions

  ...full text...

Review of “An Atrocious Biography” – Aron Aronite

From the grammatically inaccurate term ‘Lives’ gets unleashed this narrative style of insinuations about Sri Aurobindo – as if the Mystic led double lives, one imagined for him by himself which his followers and the world began believing as well, while the other ‘human aspect’ to be exclusively discovered through this self-appointed and ambidextrous style of writing pseudo history. Deshpande shows how each left handed compliment accompanies a dismissive, negativist, suggestive insinuation about Sri Aurobindo.

In fact only when we read R.Y. Deshpande’s Atrocious Biography, it gets clear how academia and intellectuals get honey trapped by this irreverence towards a Spiritual Stalwart, forgetting the fact that the gems they hurry to attest as scintillating insights are from someone who has no academic grounding, no formal education in history writing and doesn’t even have a post graduation, least of all a PhD in historiography or any mentionable qualifications in any other discipline. If we are to go by R.Y. Deshpande, we are hearing the "brilliant" (!) take of an American ‘taxi cab driver and a high school dropout’ on one of twentieth century’s most profound Mystic, and a Cambridge alumni who was proposed the Noble prize for Literature. 

  ...full text...

An Atrocious Biography – by RY Deshpande

|| The Lives of Sri Aurobindo || 

An Atrocious Biography 

is now available on Amazon at

https://www.createspace.com/4992004

 

A Preview
An Atrocious Biography by RY Deshpande

[This is a book critiquing Peter Heehs’s The Lives of Sri Aurobindo published by the Columbia University Press, US, in May 2008.]

  ...full text...

Sri Aurobindo and Hegel (1) – Krish Patwardhan

Situating Sri Aurobindo – A Reader, edited by Peter Heehs and published by Oxford University Press in 2013, is one of those arid unreadable books, the heavy metaphysical content of which simply puts you off. The book is almost entirely a compilation of articles by professors in American Universities who evaluate, analyse, dissect, compare, and situate Sri Aurobindo within the framework of their disciplines. Though most of the essays are surprisingly favourable assessments of Sri Aurobindo, considering that they have been chosen by Peter Heehs, one still gets the impression (except in a few cases) that the professors are straying beyond their legitimate and natural boundaries. Understanding Sri Aurobindo certainly needs some spiritual empathy, and that comes from a little inward opening, even if it be only a drop of genuine spiritual experience. Otherwise one commits not only spiritual but intellectual errors such as some of these professors have made, despite the expertise in their own fields. I bring to the notice of our readers one such major misunderstanding by Professor Steve Odin of the University of Hawai’i, which should be set right before it spreads further in the academic world. I quote below his conclusion with regard to Sri Aurobindo and Hegel:

  ...full text...

Sri Aurobindo’s Accident in November 1938 ― by Krish Patwardhan

In the paragraph below from the Lives of Sri Aurobindo (pp. 381-82), Peter Heehs not only misrepresents Sri Aurobindo’s relation with the Mother but gets one of the most basic facts wrong in the life of Sri Aurobindo, namely, the fracture of his right leg in the early hours of 24 November, 1938. Heehs, disregarding the factual accounts of Nirodbaran and Champaklal (the two disciples who personally served Sri Aurobindo during his last twelve years), writes that it was “a fracture of the left thigh close to the knee”! I wonder how he got his facts so wrong despite all the hagiographic fanfare about his 40 years of research on Sri Aurobindo.

  ...full text...

Analysis of the Preface of Peter Heehs’ "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" (Bio-2 – part 5) – A Zombified Disciple

Murders in the Land of the Naïve – 7

Heehs wrote Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, OUP, 1989 (Bio-1), The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, CUP, 2008, (Bio-2) & much else in the same vein.[1] I analyse his prefaces using his device critical openness of a seeker of truth & his diktat: Biographers must take their documents as they find them…, paying as much attention to what is written by the subject’s enemies as by his friends, not giving special treatment even to the subject’s own version of events. Accounts by the subject…need to be compared against other narrative accounts…that do not reflect [his] point of view. The pseudonym ‘Marcher’ is a fusion of his forebears Catherine Mayo (1867-1940) & William Archer (1856-1924), though Marcherism – degrading the Sanatana Dharma & vilifying the greatest children of Mother India – was born centuries before Mayo-Archer. The entire credit for his thriving at the expense of his subject and his ashram goes to his Daemon, a special emission of “the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and Appearances that still rule the earth-Nature”.[2]

All text in Italics is from Bio-1, Bio-2 & their prefaces; all in Roman is mine. I have often interspersed my comments in Roman within Marcher’s text which is always in italics.

  ...full text...

Colonial Hegemony of Indology – INDIA FACTS

[Another excellent article on Wendy Doniger, the negative type of Western research she represents, the colonial hangover Indian intellectuals suffer from apart from the economic interests behind this exercise of deconstructing Indian culture. – Bireshwar Choudhury]

INDIA FACTS

THE FINAL WORD / Posted by Anirban Ganguly / 23 February, 2014

Those who are at the forefront of expressing their disgust and anguish at the act of withdrawing Wendy Doniger’s snigger of a book on the Hindus are a very distinct and peculiar type. They are a type which, because they have been the beneficiaries of the munificence of the “outsiders” can hardly ever come round to accept that the “insiders” may one day speak and talk back at “outsiders” who had hitherto been the sole arbiter and definer of their image. It was, most certainly, one of these types who must have peer-reviewed Doniger’s stuff on behalf of her publishers – surprisingly that act and actor has so far managed to avoid being discovered and discussed.  This type has modeled itself “on its departed counterpart” and has always viewed “any emphasis on the ‘glories of ancient India’ as an act of Hindu Fundamentalism.”[1]

  ...full text...

Analysis of the Preface of P. Heehs’ The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, CUP, 2008 (Part 4) ― A Zombified Disciple

Murders in the Land of the Naïve – 6

Heehs wrote Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, OUP, 1989 (Bio-1), The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, CUP, 2008, (Bio-2) and much else in the same vein.[1] I analyse Bio-1 and 2 and their prefaces using his device critical openness of a seeker of truth and his diktat: Biographers must take their documents as they find them…, paying as much attention to what is written by the subject’s enemies as by his friends, not giving special treatment even to the subject’s own version of events. Accounts by the subject have exceptional value, but they need to be compared against other narrative accounts, more important, against documents that do not reflect a particular point of view.

All text in Italics is from Bio-1, Bio-2 and their prefaces; all in Roman is mine. I have often interspersed my comments in Roman within Marcher’s text which is always in italics.

  ...full text...

Analysis of the Preface of P. Heehs’ The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, CUP, 2008 (Part 3) – A Zombified Disciple

Murders in the Land of the Naïve – 5

Peter Heehs wrote Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, OUP, 1989 (Bio-1), and The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, CUP, 2008, (Bio-2), and a life-sketch.[1] My attitude and approach to Bio-2 Preface is empowered by its own diktat: Biographers must take their documents as they find them…, paying as much attention to what is written by the subject’s enemies as by his friends, not giving special treatment even to the subject’s own version of events. Accounts by the subject have exceptional value, but they need to be compared against other narrative accounts, more important, against documents that do not reflect a particular point of view. I take this preface at face value, compare it against other narrative accounts and facts that do not reflect its version of events, and analyse it with its device – critical openness of a seeker of truth. In the resultant exposé, Lives of Marcher, ‘Marcher’ is a fusion of his forebears Catherine Mayo (1867-1940) and William Archer (1856-1924), though Marcherism – degrading the Sanatana Dharma and vilifying the greatest children of Mother India, was born centuries before Mayo-Archer. Peter Marcher Heehs first encountered Sri Aurobindo in 1968. To encounter means to meet face to face, defy, oppose, confront. Of the too few exposed Marchers, ours alone continues to thrive at his subject’s expense. But its entire credit goes to his Daemon, a special emission of “the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and Appearances that still rule the earth-Nature”.[2]

  ...full text...

Analysis of the Preface of Peter Heehs’ The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, CUP, 2008 (Part 2) – A Zombified Disciple

MURDERS IN THE LAND OF THE NAÏVE – 4

Note: In this analysis, as in the previous, Peter’s words are in Italics and mine are in Roman.

Peter’s Attitude and Approach–D): (1) I first encountered Aurobindo [in an April 1950 photo] in 1968 in a yoga center on 57^th Street in Manhattan…I did not find it particularly remarkable…. A few months later…I found myself in another yoga centre…on Central Park West. Here there were just three pictures on the wall, one of them the standard portrait of Aurobindo (Figure 1). I was struck by the peaceful expanse of his brow, his trouble-free face, and fathomless eyes. It would be years before I learned that all these features owed their distinctiveness to the retoucher’s art…. (2) Figure 2 is photograph of Aurobindo taken around the same time as Figure 1. Note the dark, pockmarked skin, sharp features, and undreamy eyes. (3) As far as I know, it did not appear in print before 1976, when I published it in an ashram journal. (4) To me Figure 2 is infinitely more appealing than Figure 1. (5) There is hardly a trace of a shadow between the ears, with the result that the face has no character. The sparkling eyes have been painted in; even the hair has been given a gloss. As a historical document it is false. As a photograph it is a botched piece of work. (6) But for many, Figure 1 is more true to Aurobindo than Figure 2. (7) In later life, his complexion became fair and smooth, his features full and round. Figure 2 thus falsifies the “real” Aurobindo. (8) It is the task of the retoucher to make the photograph accord with the reality that people want to see. Hagiographers deal with documents the way that retouchers deal with photographs. Biographers must take their documents as they find them.

  ...full text...

Bireshwar Choudhury Replies to "World Union"

[Bireshwar Choudhury has replied to the comments of a netizen who calls himself “World Union” – may God bless the latter in this great endeavour! His comments were made in reference to the previous post on this site, “An Analysis of the Preface of Peter Heehs’s “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, CUP, 2008 ― A Zombified Disciple”.]

Bireshwar Choudhury: I am facilitating the World Union by pointing out the differences of opinion between self-respecting Indians and spiritually insensitive Westerners like Peter Heehs. These Westerners assume that everybody thinks the way they do, and when Indians disagree with them, they immediately dismiss them as fundamentalists because they generally have no other answer.

World Union: Since this controversial book has come out and your site created, you've written long, extremely long posts trying to counter Peter's book. You are free to have your viewpoint just as anybody else. I'm sure you're free to write a book just like Peter did.

Bireshwar: I am also free not to write a book and continue this fight on the Internet if it pays more dividends. The Internet is much more accessible to us and others.

World Union: Instead of pouring out all your anger on your site, I suggest you write a whole book countering Peter's book and proving through it how great Sri Aurobindo actually is, for it seems you believe that the world needs to be proved how great Sri Aurobindo is.

Bireshwar: If you call what we write merely the expression of anger, then why don’t you stop reading it and complaining about it?

  ...full text...